This seminar will examine the reception of J. R. Seeley’s anonymous Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ (1865), a work that caused a sensation that at the time dwarfed the controversy surrounding Darwin’s Origin of Species published just six years before. Advertised as a “scientific” account of the life of Jesus, high church and evangelical critics were aghast that the author excluded all discussion of Christ’s divinity, making no mention of miracles while ignoring entirely Christ’s resurrection. Was Ecce Homo, as claimed by its detractors,a clear attempt to secularize the life of Christ under the guise of scientific history? Or did Ecce Homo announce a new form of religious history, one that preserved what was essential about the Christian past while conforming to the new standards of critical scholarship demanded in an age of science?

Ian Hesketh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at UQ, working on the “Science, Progress and History” project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. His recent books include The Science of History in Victorian Britain (Pickering & Chatto, 2011) and Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity and the Oxford Debate (University of Toronto Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on the publication and reception of J. R. Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1865).